research. In an experiment conducted by Righart and de Gelder, ERP results show that the early stages of face processing may be affected by emotional scenes when categorizations of fearful and happy facial expressions are made by subjects. In this paradigm subjects had to view color pictures of happy or fearful faces that were centrally overlaid on pictures of natural scenes. And in order to control for low level features, such as color and other items that could care meaning, all the scene pictures were scrambled by randomizing the position of pixels across the image. The final results of the experiment show that emotion effects were associated with the N170 in which there was a larger (negative) amplitude for faces when they appeared in a fearful context then when placed in happy or neutral scenes. In fact, left occipito-temporal distributed N170 amplitudes were dramatically increased for intact fearful faces when they appeared in a fearful scene, though levels were not as high when a fearful face was presented in a happy or neutral scene. Similar results did occur in regard to intact happy faces, but the amplitudes were not as high as those related to fearful scenes or expressions. Righart and de Gelder conclude that information from task-irrelevant scenes is rapidly combined with the information from facial expressions, and that subjects use context information in the early stage of processing when they need to discriminate/categorize facial expressions. Results from a study conducted by Ghuman and colleagues using direct neural recordings from the fusiform face area using electrocorticography showed that while the N170 displays a very strong response to faces when compared to other visual images, the N170 is not sensitive to the identity of the face. Instead, they showed that which face a person is viewing can be decoded from the activity between 250–500 ms, consistent with the hypothesis that identity processing begins with the N250. These results suggest that the N170 is important for gist-level processing of faces and face detection, processes which may set the stage for later face individuation. Generators Given the ease and rapidity with which humans can recognize faces, a great deal of neuroscientific research has endeavored to understand how and where the brain processes them. Early research on prosopagnosia, or "face blindness", found that damage to the occipito-temporal region led to an impaired or complete inability for people to recognize faces. Convergent evidence for